The launch of Apple Pay in the UK has been a complete disaster, the software does not work, the system charges you double, and some leading banks do not support it yet.

HSBC was named and shamed for not having the service ready and had hate mail from fanboys as a result. For those who came in late HSBC has won awards for the security on its bank accounts but for some reason it has been slow in allowing Apple pay into its systems.

HSBC was originally listed as one of Apple's banking partners at launch, but has since said its account holders won't be able to use Apple Pay until later in July, now confirmed as July 28. The delays frustrated Apple fanboys who flooded twitter to vent their spleen.

However it turns out that HSBC's delays might have saved its customers from losing a pile of dosh.

Transport for London has warned tube, train and bus passengers paying with Apple Pay on iPhones and Apple Watches not to let their batteries run flat or they could get stuck at gates and face penalty fares.

Apple Pay only works if a device has power. It warns that, if the battery runs out in the middle of a journey, a user will not be able to tap out, which means they could be charged a maximum fare.

It also warns that receiving a call while attempting to touch into or out of the gates will also cause issues, and that users with multiple cards on their account must remember to use the same one or potentially be charged twice.

Early adopters have also complained about the speed of Apple Pay compared to Oyster or contactless. Difficulties using Touch ID to authenticate payments combined with the speed at which a payment is recognised have been causing problems for some.

In short Apple did not figure all this out before launch and priming its Tame Apple Press to sing its glory. However the BBC could not even get it buy a cup of coffee. The Beeb put it down to teething troubles, but given the system has been running in the US for a while you wouldn't expect to see so many problems like this.

Brandwatch, a company which calls itself an "enterprise social intelligence platform", and which monitors social networks to find out how twitterers feel about things.

The company compiled a list of 26,000 online mentions of the Apple Watch UK launch, and so assembled an unwilling focus group of 15,789 people.

It is fairly clear that people are struggling with the technology. Brandwatch found that ten per cent of posts are about how to get it to work, with Brandwatch saying that:

"Apple Pay is positioned as being the fastest and easiest way to pay [but] if you think there's a 50 per cent chance it could fail, you'll just reach for your credit card instead."

Apple Pay is not getting much traction in the US, where the big retailers are thinking of coming up with their own ideas. Rival payment services are now starting to look rather more useful.

The British High Court has ruled that Emergency surveillance legislation introduced by the coalition government last year is illegal.

A judicial challenge by the Labour MP Tom Watson and the Conservative MP David Davis has been upheld by judges, who found that the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (Dripa) 2014 is "inconsistent with European Union law".

The act required internet and phone companies to keep their communications data for a year and regulates how police and intelligence agencies gain access to it.Now it seems that the government will now have to pass fresh legislation that must come into effect before the end of March.

Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Collins declared that section 1 of the act "does not lay down clear and precise rules providing for access to and use of communications data" and should be "disapplied". The judges said the order should be suspended until after 31 March 2016 "to give parliament the opportunity to put matters right".

Basically the law has two problems. It does not provide for independent court or judicial scrutiny to ensure that only data deemed "strictly necessary" is examined. It also fails to define what constitutes "serious offences" in relation to which material can be investigated.

The judges relied on an earlier decision, known as Digital Rights Ireland, by the European Court of Justice in Luxemburg, which is binding on UK courts.

Davis and Watson said that the law allowed the police and security services to spy on citizens without sufficient privacy safeguards. They said the legislation was incompatible with article eight of the European convention on human rights, the right to respect for private and family life, and articles seven and eight of the EU charter of fundamental rights, respect for private and family life and protection of personal data.

They pointed out that the law was not limited to cases involving serious crime, that individual notices of data retention were kept secret, and that no provision was made for those under obligation of professional confidentiality, in particular lawyers and journalists. Nor, they argued, were there adequate safeguards against communications data leaving the EU.

The Home Office is to appeal against the ruling, which, it warned, may result in police and investigators losing data that could save lives.

Home Office security minister, John Hayes, said: "Communications data is not just crucial in the investigation of serious crime. It is also a fundamental part of investigating other crimes which still have a severe impact, such as stalking and harassment, as well as locating missing people, including vulnerable people who have threatened to commit suicide."

Apple is having a huge problem getting its Apple Pay off the ground in the US, so now it is having a crack at the UK.

After all the UK is a nation of shopkeepers who would just love to use the latest technology and help subsidise the fruity cargo cult's cash pile. The Tame Apple Press made the announcement that Apple Pay launching in the UK and how it will bring peace in our time.

However Dan Wagner, eCommerce veteran and CEO of Powa Technologies said that while the launch of Apple Pay shows that consumer demand for mobile payments is rising and it will continue to rise it is not necessarily going to be widely adopted in Blighty.

The platform has some constraints as it is only available to iPhone 6 and Apple Watch users and it relies on Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.

"What shoppers really want is a ubiquitous solution which allows them to buy products anywhere, at anytime, from a range of mediums, using any digital device," Wagner said.

"The decision to only use NFC also drastically reduces the scope of its usage for retailers as they have to support NFC terminals. Apple Pay doesn't support online shopping either - once again limiting what consumers can use it for," Wagner said.

He said that despite Apple being an instantly recognisable brand, Apple Pay's limitations mean it can only be seen as just another way to pay for things.

"To stand out in an already crowded market, new entrants should provide more than just a payments service. Many retailers don't see a benefit in Apple Pay because they want a solution that will help them create an omni-channel sales offering, engage better with their customers and understand their shopping habits."

It short it will be seen as a chocolate teapot because Apple is not flexible enough to sell it properly.

The US organisation responsible for doling out IP addresses has rejected a request because there was not enough stock of the IPv4 flavour.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) posted a note on its website confirming the move, although it did not say from where the request had come.

ARIN chief executive John Curran aid that ARIN activated the IPv4 Unmet Requests policy this week with the approval of an address request that was larger than the available inventory in the regional IPv4 free pool.

The move does not mean that there are no IPv4 addresses left, but that requests will have to be smaller or applicants will have to wait for blocks of address space to be returned.

Curran practically begged companies to pussy footing around and adopt IPv6 because there was shedloads of that around.

ARIN is the latest major holder of IPv4 addresses to confirm that it now has limited stock, after similar announcements by organisations in Asia in 2011, Europe in 2012 and Latin America in 2014.

The dwindling amount of IPv4 addresses means that their worth is increasing, something the UK government is hoping to make a pile of dosh flogging 17 million unused addresses that could be worth millions.

Although you will not see it in the Tame Apple Press, in China Xiaomi is flogging shedloads of fitness bands for $13.

You can pick them up on Amazon for £16 .and the only one star reviews are from Apple fanboys who are complaining.

Xiaomi hasn't been in the wearables game for long, but has already flogged six million of its Mi Bands.

True it does not do as much as the Apple iWatch, but it is also a tiny fraction of the price and it does not require recharging every few hours.

For $13 you get the basic functions that you might need, such as workout tracking, sleep tracking, and an impressive 30-day battery life. No wonder the Tame Apple Press is failing to mention it.

And since someone who owns one is unlikely to want an iWatch too so that is a sale that Job's Mob is not getting. This is not taking into account the huge Chinese knock-off market, and some far better technology put out there by Apple's rivals

What is also important is that these sales are in China, which is the market that Apple needs to do better in if it is going to maintain its "buy every year" cult.

While US retailers have treated Apple Pay with a loud resounding yawn, Jobs' Mob thinks it will have more like with the British.

When Apple pay was launched in the US, to a great fanfare, retailers ignored it completely because it basically involved giving Apple a cut of the sale price while not getting any information off the sale themselves.

Retailers rushed to set up their own systems and there is even more enthusiasm for the Google Pay scheme being mooted.

Now it seems that Apple has solved the problem by trying to palm it off on that nation of shopkeepers – the United Kingdom,

Apple is expected to make the announcement on today in San Francisco at its annual conference for developers. The reason is that it does not think it can find Brits to show the right levels of enthusiasm, because it is not in the British character to whoop or make sounds like Gibbon when Tim Cook makes the announcement.

It quoted the sources as saying the company had been in talks with banks and retailers about the project since last year.

Transport for London is already accepting Apple Pay from American tourists.

The British Empire's attempt to crush piracy using the power of the Internet has been about as successful as its 19th century invasion of Afghanistan.

The Pirate Bay is still accessible for some UK users, in spite of web-block injunctions available under UK law, which can be used to force ISPs to restrict access to websites that enable copyright infringement.

It has been almost impossible for the ISPs to crush a sudden rise in proxies which sidestep ISP blocks. As soon as one is blocked another two pop-up.

According to Torrentfreak, Pirate Bay blocks have recently stopped working on for BT, EE, Virgin and TalkTalk users, which it says is a result of The Pirate Bay switching to an SSL service provided by US company

The SSL service is called CloudFlare and the HTTPS version of TPB has reportedly been made default instead of the HTTP version.

An operator of a TPB proxy site said that the the unblocking is because of how CloudFlare works. Simply put, when you enable HTTPS Strict on CloudFlare, they remove the HTTP Header from the request during HTTPS connections, thus when the ISPs try to inspect the header to a list of 'banned' websites it won't register.

"So any site that uses CloudFlare, has a properly configured and signed SSL Certificate, and enables HTTPS-Strict under CloudFlare should be able to evade the ban that's imposed by Virgin and perhaps other providers".

Coppers across the UK have arrested 56 people on suspicion of computer hacking offences.

The National Crime Agency arrested include a 23-year-old man from Sutton Coldfield who is believed to have been involved in breaking into the computer network of the US Department of Defence in 2014.

The attack saw contact information for around 800 people stolen from the network.

A second person was arrested in Leeds for their suspected involvement with the Lizard Squad hacking group. In January, an 18-year-old man was arrested in London on suspicion of carrying out cyber-attacks that crippled the PlayStation and Xbox Live networks in late 2014, for which responsibility was claimed by Lizard Squad.

A 21-year-old man was arrested in London on suspicion of being part of the D33Ds Company hacking collective, who are believed to have been behind a 2012 cyberattack on Yahoo, which saw the theft of more than 400,000 email addresses and passwords which were later published online.

The NCA's "strike week" saw 25 operations carried out across the UK and those arrested are suspected of being involved in a range of cybercrimes, including data theft, fraud and creating computer viruses.

Specialist officers from regional organised crime squads worked with the Metropolitan Police, the NCA and the National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) to make the 56 arrests. The biggest operation took place in London and Essex and saw 25 people arrested on suspicion of using the internet to steal money, launder cash and carry out other frauds.

British conservatives have shocked the business community by dealing with the fact that Google is dodging huge amounts of tax.

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s policy so far has been to tax poor people as a way of earning cash, but this time it appears he has actually targeted tech companies and other international firms.

He is proposing a 25 per cent tax on profits on outfits that use complex structures to lower their U.K. tax bills.

“Some of the largest companies in the world, including those in the tech sector, use elaborate structures to avoid paying taxes. That is not fair to other British firms. It is not fair to British people either. Today we are putting a stop to it. My message is consistent and clear: low taxes, but low taxes that will be paid.”

The tax, dubbed a “Google tax” by the British press, is expected to raise more than $1.56 billion over five years, Mr. Osborne said.

It is still unclear exactly what will constitute taxable activity in the UK and how it might change the tax bill of companies like Google and Facebook. Representatives from several tech companies were not immediately available to comment.

Google and other companies have been targeted by France and other European governments for not paying enough taxes. The issue is complicated by the companies’ setup: They can have sales representatives in one country selling online services, like ads, that appear in others, while the company’s residence for taxation purposes might be elsewhere still.